Timeouts and Whitescreens in SMF

[keith021773]

Hey guys.  I know this is TP, but I trust you guys and I wanted to see if any of you have seen this before.  This is happening on my forums..    The rest is quoted from what I posted on SMF website, but I haven't gotten an answer from them and it has been a couple of days...

SMF Version: SMF 1.1
Ok all.   I have a weird problem and wanted to run it by all of you and see if you have came across this before. 
My site:

SMF 1.1
Tiny Portal 0.9.7

Ok.  This has been happening for awhile now and I just can't find the answer.  I have even contacted my host many, many times and each time they look but can't find a problem.  There are no problems in the error log of any kind.

Usually, between the hours of noon thru 6pm, SOME messages on my board give whitescreens and timeouts.  Examples of what causes these timeouts and whitescreens.....   Clicking on "Users Online", click the "new" icon on messages that are new, and clicking on member profiles or trying to view your profile.   Now during this time, the site is just as fast as it normally is.   Everything works fine except those examples.   After that time frame, the site goes back to being great and no problems.  It has done this for the last several days now and is getting very troublesome.

Things I have done to try and fix this.     
I have disabled all scripts.  I disabled  ads, java scripts (sports scores and RSS news feeds).   I disallowed all spiders in the robots.txt file (too see if so many of them caused this).    I went to MySQL and deleted all tables in there that I didn't use anymore.    Is there anything that I am missing?   Please help and offer suggestions.  I have several members that this is bothering too and I'm afraid that my site will lose out on new members if they encounter this.   My site is a site for dads and we give advice to new and old dads.  So it's pretty important (to me anyway  LOL).

Many thanks in advance!!!

[G6Cad]

After i have read it i can just say it's your host that is over loaded big time with a lot of clients.
Eather thay have to get another server to split their customers to lower the server load, or you have to change host.
We cant do anything for you with this, it's a plain host issue, and if they say otherwise, seek another host thats willing to listen to you and give you what you pay for.

[nukebiz]

On the other hand, if you are in a shared hosting environment, and you have a high volume site, this might be an expected result for your hosting package, so it may be time to upgrade to a different hosting package, or even a dedicated server.  Quite often, you simply get what you pay for

Do make sure you don't have "Use a persistent connection" checked in your SMF admin Server Settings.  Another trap occurs if you have several databases in use in your account and have not setup with a different username for each database.

One quick way of checking your hosting performance is to check your server status when your site encounters this problem e.g. if you have CPanel or the equivalent, there should be a section where you can view Server Information.

Typically, you will see something like,
Server Load   2.43 (4 cpus)
When the load regularly goes above say, 4, and spends time at levels higher than that, you have an idea that someone in your shared environment is pulling large resources, and quite possibly more than their fair share.  If your host can't find any issues, then as G6 says, it may be time to move.

[keith021773]

Thanks guys for the replies.  "Use a persistent connection" has never been checked so I know it's not that.   I do agree with both of you on the changing hosts as I have thought that for awhile now.   But they just moved my site to a brand new server and when I check it on whois, it says that there are alittle bit over 400 other sites on the server.   

I just renewed my site for another year, I don't want to lost the money, but I can't take the whitescreens much more.   LOL   

Yesterday (Friday) there were no whitescreens so maybe, just maybe that have fixed it.      We'll see.